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  Copyright © 2018 by Sharon Wray

  Cover and internal design © 2018 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover design by Eileen Carey/No Fuss Design

  Cover images © Westend61/Getty Images, Cloudniners/Getty Images, Ysbrand Cosijn/Shutterstock, CURAphotography/Shutterstock

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks, Inc., is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.

  Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

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  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  In loving memory

  of

  Karen E. M. Johnston

  Best friend and critique partner

  Be brave. Be strong. Be dauntless.

  Prologue

  Juliet’s daddy had always told her to stay away from men who bowed. But tonight, as she struggled with her groceries in the snow, she almost asked the stranger in the shadows across the street for help. He bowed as she walked by and, as creepy as that seemed, she was reconsidering her daddy’s warning. It was still Valentine’s Day, after all.

  She blinked against the freezing wind, and the man had disappeared. She made it to her apartment and almost stepped on the ivory envelope. Balancing her bags in one arm, she picked it up. From its weight and polished paper, a letter instead of a bill.

  A valentine, maybe? From Rafe?

  Flurries blew as she unlocked the door. Five months apart. Five months since their argument. Five months and he’d finally sent her an apology. The ache in her heart loosened, and she went inside. Frigid, mildew-tinged air blasted at her, and her breath came out in cold, white gusts. The heat was off. Again.

  She placed the bags on the kitchen counter and turned the envelope over. The linen stationery felt thick and expensive. Someone had sealed it with a wax stamp of a sword piercing a heart and written her name in script on the other side. It wasn’t Rafe’s familiar, irregular printing.

  After trading her coat for her favorite sweater, she curled up on the couch. Her husband was undercover with his A-team. Had someone else sent the letter on his behalf? It wouldn’t be the first time he’d broken the rules. Still, five months wasn’t the longest they’d gone without contact. Last year he’d been away for eight. Except this goodbye had been different. They’d argued, said things she prayed they hadn’t meant, and hadn’t made love before he left.

  Something that had never happened before.

  She held the letter to her heart and looked at the unpacked boxes stacked around her. Rafe had left the week they’d moved from Fort Bragg’s temporary housing into this apartment, days after his mother’s funeral, and she’d refused to unpack completely. Without him, it didn’t feel like home.

  Worry and lack of sleep had left her exhausted. Nightmares plagued her nights. Dreams she’d had since childhood that only Rafe’s touch could heal. For the past few weeks, she’d been obsessed with a heavy feeling in her heart she could only define as doom.

  She broke the seal and read. The back of her throat burned. Her sweaty hands gripped the edges of the stationery, tearing it. And she read the letter again. It wasn’t a valentine.

  No. No. No. She fell off the couch and crawled to the bathroom. She barely made it before the eruption hit. Minutes later, she rinsed her mouth and leaned her forehead against the window. The room smelled like vomit, bleach, and mold. It reeked of betrayal.

  Outside, the moon hung full, like on the night he’d left. Another wave of nausea drove her to her knees. She rolled into a ball, her arms tucked in close. He wasn’t dead. He just wasn’t coming home. Ever.

  The doorbell rang, and she ignored it. She lay there for minutes or hours or days. When even the moon turned in, she shifted onto her back and stared at the stained ceiling. The brown concentric circles reminded her of constellations. The star patterns she and Rafe identified together out on the Isle when they were kids.

  “Pegasus.” She raised one arm to reach the sky. The winged horse constellation had been her favorite, only visible a few weeks of every year. She’d always dreamed of flying away from the Isle, her father, her poverty. But instead of reaching the stars, she’d married the man she’d adored since she was four and he was eight.

  When the doorbell rang again and again and again, she got up, determined to send whoever the hell it was away. She flung the door open to find two Army MPs in full uniform, wearing pistols, standing side by side. Their grim faces shared identical hard angles. Cold air burst into the room, chilling her even more.

  “Mrs. Montfort?” the first MP asked.

  “Yes?”

  “Ma’am.” The second MP held out a pair of handcuffs. “You’ll need to come with us.”

  Chapter 1

  Juliet’s house had disappear
ed.

  Rafe Montfort scrubbed a hand over his face. A strangling ache invaded his chest, filling the empty space that once held his heart. He shifted the Army duffel he’d shouldered for the past six miles, moving the burn from one arm to the other. Why had he assumed her father’s trailer would still be standing? That she’d be living there? Waiting for him?

  Because he wasn’t only a bastard who made assumptions. He was a fool who once believed the Prince’s brutal goals justified Rafe’s ruthless actions.

  Or, as Escalus used to say, “a fool whose violent delights have violent ends.”

  Summer cicadas hummed in the Isle of Grace’s surrounding woods, their mournful drone filling Rafe’s head with rhythmic disapproval. Sweat soaked his T-shirt, pooling low in his back above his waistband. Where he used to keep his gun.

  He wasn’t just a bastard. He wasn’t just a fool. He just wasn’t the man he’d once hoped to become. With a nod to his broken past, he left the overgrown property and headed home.

  Keep it moving, Montfort. That’s right. One boot in front of the other.

  He kicked an empty beer bottle into a ditch, shattering the brown glass, and marched toward Pops’s trailer tucked between the towering Georgia pines a half mile down the Isle’s dirt road. He’d given up his honor, his wife, his men. Thank God his mother had died before he betrayed everyone he loved. In the years he’d been away, he hadn’t just cut out his heart; he’d sold his soul.

  Despite the breeze, questions about Juliet’s departure burned his blood.

  Why had she left? He climbed the pine steps to the deck alongside the double-wide.

  Where’d she go? He jumped the last two steps to avoid the missing planks.

  Did she ever think of him? The Capels had arrived on the Isle long before the American Revolution. It’d never occurred to him that her family would leave. For eight long years, he’d been counting on that.

  His duffel landed with a thud next to an outboard motor and buckets of fishing gear. He rubbed the knotted muscles in his shoulder and faced the broken screen door. His vision faded until all he could see was the blurry mesh.

  What the hell was he doing? Why had he even come home? Because he’d had no choice. Everything depended on him remembering that. With renewed determination, he raised his fist and hit the metal door.

  No answer. He closed his eyes, took another breath, and knocked again.

  Juliet’s family was gone. Had his left as well?

  He heard a banging around back, pulled out his leather jacket, and covered the tattoos on his arms. He’d rather die of heat stroke than start an argument. Then he jumped over the deck rail. His combat boots made it easier to walk through the tall weeds to the red barn a hundred yards behind the trailer. Three times larger than the home, the barn and surrounding yard held remnants of every American classic car ever made.

  Everything stood as if he’d never left, except for the cell boost antenna on the barn’s roof. From the height and distance, it probably provided a cell signal the width and depth of Pops’s property. Pops had joined the twenty-first century? Maybe miracles were possible.

  He drew closer and saw his daddy’s gray head bobbing up and down beneath the hood of a black 1958 Chevy Impala. He stopped on the other side of the car and exhaled until his lungs ached. “Pops?”

  His dad raised his head, his eyes squinting. “Who’s there?”

  “It’s me. Rafe.”

  A man, shorter than he remembered, stood. In a stained red T-shirt and overalls with one strap hanging down, his father waited a few moments before nodding. At least he wasn’t holding a beer. Or his shotgun.

  Rafe waved at the car. “She’s a real beauty. She yours?”

  “No.” Pops wiped his dirty hands on an oily rag, and Rafe focused on the remaining finger on his father’s right hand. He’d given the other four to the Marines. “She belongs to your brother.”

  “Good for him.”

  Pops tossed the rag onto the engine and gripped the side of the Chevy’s frame. His hard stare took in Rafe’s leather jacket in what had to be triple-digit heat. “What you doin’ here, boy?”

  He held out his hand. A hug would only be an invitation to an ass-kicking. “The Army released me from prison.”

  “Released?” His father picked up a dirty wrench, his face brown beneath a haircut the Corps would salute. “What the hell for? Good behavior?”

  “No, sir.” He dropped his hand. If disapproval were a color, it would be the dark, muddy brown in his father’s grim gaze. “I don’t know why.”

  Since he’d spent two years in a Russian jail and then the last nine months locked in isolation in Leavenworth, he wasn’t sure what to think. “I was told to return to Savannah and wait for a call.”

  While it went against every one of his hard-earned instincts urging him to run, he’d come home to find out what the hell was going on. Besides, it wasn’t like he had anyplace else to go.

  “You still a sergeant?”

  A sharp ache hit Rafe’s back molars, and he eased off the teeth grinding. On his left, he noticed a band of magnolia trees surrounding a white glory cross. He shoved his hands into his jacket pockets and forced himself to meet his father’s reproach. “I don’t know what I am.” Sergeant? Prisoner 061486? The Prince’s warrior? Hell if he knew.

  “I know what you are,” Pops said. “Damn traitor. Not to mention adulterer, liar, thief.”

  Rafe’s exhale sounded more like a hiss. While he wasn’t all of those things, he’d done other things—worse things. “I was also dishonorably discharged.”

  His father snorted and rocked back on his heels, watching, waiting. Probably for an apology. So like Pops.

  Without a word, Pops ducked back under the hood and collected his tools. A torque wrench, the old spark plugs, another rag. “What reason would the U.S. Army have for letting a dishonorably discharged ex-Green Beret out of prison?”

  Rafe gripped the frame with both hands. “They dropped the case against me.”

  “That makes no sense. You ditched your men. Then got caught working as a mercenary or somethin’. Ain’t no way to walk that back, Son. Ain’t no chance.”

  “I know.” There’d been extenuating circumstances, the kind of circumstances beyond any soldier’s control. Five thousand one hundred and eleven reasons, to be exact.

  Pops straightened and they shut the hood of the car together. The click-bang echoed around the yard littered with wounded vehicles, followed by the hollow clatter of tools being tossed into a metal toolbox.

  Pops wiped the sweat off his brow with his arm. “You want to stay here until you get that call?”

  “Until I figure out what’s going on. But I need something from you. Information.”

  His father’s eyes thinned, looking like slits in a wrinkled potato. “Juliet est partie.”

  Pops spoke in French—the language of Rafe’s momma—and that meant no more questions unless you wanted to see the buckle end of his belt. Except Rafe was taller and stronger than his father. Had been for a long time.

  “Où est-elle?” Rafe kept his tone casual, but when Pops didn’t answer, he tried again. “Where’d she go?”

  Pops headed for the trailer. “You can’t undo what you did, Son. And what you did to Juliet was bad. Real bad.”

  Rafe followed, inhaling the humid air until his chest burned. “I need to know she’s okay.” Although there weren’t enough sorries to make up for what he’d done, protecting Juliet was his priority. Always had been. He was done with war and its ever-changing rules. Once assured of her safety, he’d ditch Savannah and start his life over again. Alone.

  Only problem was he had to disappear before the Prince found out about his release. And it had to be forever.

  “What about your brother?” Pops said. “You worried about him, too?”

  “No.”

>   “Still damn stubborn.” Pops shook his head. “You two have things to work out. Bad history. But family’s important.”

  “Which is why I need to check on Juliet.”

  Pops faced him. “Do you know what St. Peter uses to polish his heavenly gates?”

  Rafe crossed his arms. Some things never changed. “Not a clue, sir.”

  “Humility.” Pops poked Rafe in the chest with the only finger on his right hand. “Considering the shit you’re standing in, you’d do well to shut down your pride and hold your temper.”

  Rafe wasn’t the only man in the family with anger issues, but he answered, “Yes, sir.”

  Pops pulled a humming cell phone out of his back pocket. He tossed it to Rafe. “Is this what you’re waitin’ for?”

  He caught the phone and read the text from a blocked ID.

  Welcome home, Romeo. Tis Escalus.

  Rafe went for the weapon in his back waistband, except it wasn’t there. He scanned the tree line of the surrounding pine forest. If Escalus was near, so was his sniper rifle. “Maybe.”

  Pops harrumphed and left Rafe standing in the weeds.

  Once Pops went inside, Rafe pounded the phone’s keyboard.

  Did the Prince buy my freedom?

  No. And the Prince will doom thee to death if thou speak.

  Considering the Prince had thrown Rafe’s ass into a Russian prison, his former boss wouldn’t be high-fiving the change in status. But what would the Prince and his warriors—including Escalus—do about it?

  How did you find me?

  We’ve never lost a kinsman. You belong to us, Romeo. Remember thy vow, such as lovers used to swear?

  Rafe stretched out his right arm covered in leather, ruined from wrist to shoulder. He more than remembered his vow to the Prince. His damn tithe. The life he’d given up to save those he loved. Nothing less than everything.

  What do you want?

  Come back to us. Unless you no longer love Lady Juliet?

  Rafe typed, You hurt my wife and I’ll kill you but deleted the message before hitting send. Starting a war with Escalus would only make things worse. Rafe had only been out for three days, and already his past was fucking with his present. Fantastic.